The Maritime Museum once more

The Compañia Maritima building sits idly as it waits for the heavens to shower it with blessings. Despite a few plans, nothing is certain yet while it stands forlorn and bored as it seemingly guards the southern end of the SRP Subway Tunnel.

This much I told Jeremy Barns, director of the National Museum of the Philippines, the other week. The occasion was the quarterly meeting of the National Committee on Museums (NCOM), one of the bodies under the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).

(I have been attending these meetings representing both Eastern and Central Visayas on behalf of the Visayas Association of Museums and Galleries Inc.)

Director Barns was happy to report that, beyond the current renovation of the NM building and the rehabilitation of the pre-World War II Senate Hall, two other branch museums were to be funded with millions, one being Fort Pilar in Zamboanga. Upon inquiry about Cebu, he mentioned his request for the Malacañang sa Sugbo, the former Cebu Customs House, to be turned over to NM to become its permanent Cebu branch.

This is a tricky issue inasmuch as the Bureau of Customs is also asserting its right over the building especially since it appears that President Noynoy Aquino is not interested in ever using it. (Incidentally, the building also sits so inutile that one wonders why Malacañang is still holding on to something it obviously does not want to occupy.)

I told Barns that another building sits very near this contested Customs House that may be the most ideal for a National Museum of Philippine Maritime History and is well suited since almost all the shipping companies in the country then as now started in Cebu anyway. Apparently, the NM director has not been made aware of this building and it was the first time he had heard of it.

Little is known of this building’s beginnings but I found some photos from a private collection showing it under construction some time before it was finished in 1910. There are also court cases involving the company written about on the Internet shed some light on its owners—and the owners of the building.

Originally called the Fernandez Hermanos Building (owned by the Fernandez brothers Don Jose and Don Ramon), it was home to Shamrock Hotel before the hotel moved to a building near Magallanes Street in the late 1930s. This Fernandez Hermanos Building used to hug the Aduana pier in pre-World War II times so that when one arrived via the SS Corregidor or SS Capiz, two of the many Compañia Maritima steamships of the late 1920s and 30s, you could literally cross the street and check in at the hotel.

Until Typhoon Ruping blew off its roof in 1992 and left the building a shell of its old glory, there used to be a huge COMPAÑIA MARITIMA sign painted all throughout its second or third floor wall facing the sea.

Some time in the 1990s, the Environmental Management Bureau of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources apparently took possession of this building, perhaps because its lease on reclaimed land from the Philippine Government had already expired.

I remember that during one of the trips of former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to Cebu, she verbally ordered the transfer of this building to the care of the city government but in one of those rare instances when I bumped into Mayor Michael Rama (I think on board the Galeon Andalucia when it docked in Cebu last year), he mentioned to me that the transfer never happened.

Now is a good time to think well how to begin getting this building for the National Museum while no one else is staking any claims on it.

With plenty of shipping companies still around, perhaps funds can be raised to begin the process of finally converting it into the first and only maritime museum of this country (so full of islands that one wonders why we do not have such a museum in the first place).

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My attention was called by one of the forumers of our Cebu Heritage Watch Thread 11 on the Internet regarding Sebastian de Elcano, whom I wrote about last week.

I got it wrong when I wrote that he is not listed in the manifest except via Malaca. Elcano did join Magellan’s fleet when it left San Lucar de Barrameda on Sept. 20, 1519. Thanks to “Nangamote’ for pointing this out.